Thoughts on Life, Love, Politics, Hypocrisy and Coming Out in Mid-Life

Sunday, April 16, 2017

Why Trump’s Attempt to Scare North Korea May Horrifically Backfire

Throughout his real estate career, Donald Trump has used bullying - added to ignoring the law and associating with mafia figures - to accomplish his goals. Stated another way, he thinks he can do whatever he wants and people are supposed to give in to him. It's a characteristic of many narcissist that they are so self-absorbed that they try to ride rough shod over others. Frighteningly, this mindset now animates the White House and it could yet have truly disastrous consequences for literally millions of people. With North Korea, Trump doesn't seem to grasp that he is facing a regime headed by an individual (or individuals) even more un-tethered from reality than he is himself. Throw in huge doses of paranoia and a near martyr complex among North Korea's leaders and it makes for an immensely dangerous mix. My fear is that Trump is in way, way over his head and that, if he acts in his usual manner, a catastrophe could be in the offing. Here are excerpts from New York Magazine that underscore the dangers we face with an unfit commander-in-chief in the White House:

President
Trump and his advisers have taken a more and more threatening stance toward North
Korea since January, and the isolated dictatorship has responded with threats
of its own. Foreign-policy experts say a breaking point could be looming.
Saturday marked the 105th anniversary of the birth of North Korea’s founder,
Kim Il-sung, and the regime there commemorated the holidaywith displays of military force — though, thankfully, not with a nuclear test,
as many experts feared. Still, there is a sense of a collision course. Several
days ago, the U.S. militarymoved a brigade of warships to the Korean Peninsula, as a show of force.
Then on Friday, the North Korean governmentthreatened to attack major American military bases in South Korea,
saying it could destroy them almost instantly.

[W]e
spoke with George Lopez, professor emeritus at the Krok Institute for
International Peace Studies, which is based at Notre Dame University. He has
advised the United Nations and various governments on North Korea and sanctions
issues since 1992. Lopez also proposes a set of directions for getting out of
this conflict — directions that favor diplomacy over military force. What American
leaders fail to understand, he says, is that they can’t scare North Korea by
threatening war.

Obama’s
people told Trump’s top foreign-policy people this was their biggest worry.
Obama seems to have told Trump in their one-on-one meeting that North Korea was
going to be Trump’s biggest dilemma and that he needed a regional approach to
it.

[T]his [past] week, the administration used what many would call a
prohibited weapon in the Afghan theater, and it has also launched these strikes
on Syria. . . . I think it was not without some delight in the White
House that there was a secondary messaging effect to North Korea. These actions
went in conjunction with the U.S. moving a small Navy brigade to the Korean
Peninsula, and also with Trump’s meeting and phone calls with the Chinese
president, to signal that our patience is running out.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear who is the Asia expert most
influential in the White House’s national security staff, and the last time I
checked the State Department chart, we still didn’t have a fully staffed Bureau
of Asian Affairs. . . . .

[O]ne strategy that a group of us have advocated over the last couple
weeks is to say, “Military force is so crazy to think about, the next best
option is financial bankruptcy and economic strangulation.” That is, if you
want to take the gloves off, take the gloves off in the trading and financial
sector. Take a lesson from the tightening of the noose around Iran, and go
after commodities, go after general trade sectors. You absolutely implement the
top five or six recommendations of the U.N. Panel of Experts, which would hold
all states in the Asian region responsible for ending corresponding banking
accounts with not only North Korean banks, but with the shadow companies they’ve
set up in Malaysia and China and elsewhere.

China needs to get tighter with the financial actors within
its country who continue to sustain unabated channels to illicit financing for
North Korea. There are a series of draconian financial measures that then get
the attention of the great young dictator, and you can say, “The next move is
yours. Do we talk or not?” But what this administration has done is put us in
an all-or-nothing bind. Either he blinks or we blink.

[T]he issuing of
the threat against South Korea [by North Korea] is a smart approach that says, “Well, let’s talk
militarily. You could knock out our nuclear sites, but you can’t knock out the
175 major artillery batteries we have, poised to shoot at the minute we detect
that we’re being attacked — and those can knock out 80 percent of Seoul. So the
blood will be on your hands if you choose to initiate an attack against our
nuclear sites.” In other words, “You’re not the only people who can issue
ultimatums, and you’re not the only people who have military deliverables that
are supposed to make us quake and fear that we must change our behavior.”

This regime has had an ideology, through three generations, that the
war of liberation of South Korea will come when the United States oversteps its
boundaries. And remember, they don’t have a peace treaty with the United
States. If they were interested in peace, they would be proactive in coming
back to the bargaining table and finishing off the armistice agreement from
1953.

This isn’t Syria. This isn’t Afghanistan. This is the point
at which, if a U.S. missile crosses into North Korean territory, all bets on
everything are off. It fits their worldview, that sooner or later, they will
have to fire everything they have. That’s the only way the North could
potentially survive an exchange.

[W]e
need a U.S. policy that doesn’t put them in a position where their trigger
fingers get nervous. You have to deal with the nuclear weapons and the missiles
on their own terms, and you can’t use the potential for war against them as
leverage. . . . They’re ready for war.

[W]e have to end
their access to money — in all forms. We have to end the access of Korean
diplomats marching off with big duffle bags, pretending they’re off to go play
golf in Poland, when what they’re really doing is carrying gold bars and loads
of cash, which ultimately goes to fund the various services that run the
missiles. And you do need China’s help for that. Right now, China is looking
the other way.

We’ve got to make sure our president doesn’t approach the microphone
and says, “That’s the last straw. I’m taking actions in the next 48 hours, and
they’ll never know what I’m going to do until I do it.”Youcan’thave that.In other words, someone needs
to lasso him, quite frankly, and make sure we have a clearly articulated
dynamic.

We think we can intimidate the North Korean leadership into
keepingtheir powder dry.
What we’re doing, more than anything else, is playing into their ongoing
scenario of a likely, if not inevitable, confrontation with the West. . . . If
you’re going to use as your calculus of success or failure, of an unarticulated
policy, who blinks first, you’re on really, really shaky ground.

Be very, very afraid, Would that Trump voters had even considered this scenario rather falling for appeals to racism and resentment over lost white privilege and extremist religious beliefs. Elections have consequences as the world could soon find out.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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